TV Habits When Traveling

What are your television habits when you travel? Do you take your television with you (Slingbox comes to mind)? Do you bring extra cables so you can hook your laptop up to the hotel’s television and watch media through your laptop? Or do you bring an even smaller device to do the same thing?

The bigger question: how do you consume your media when you travel?

I do not watch too much television. The local news, episodes of Clean House on the Style Network, and Cardinals’ Baseball. None of these things, in general, are things I can get when I’m traveling, except through my laptop and the hotel’s Internet connection. When I am gone for more than a day or two, I like to catch up on my hometown news just to be sure nothing horrific happened in my neighborhood. I can do that by loading up one of the local television station’s websites, and watching their broadcast of the news live. I can catch up on epsiodes of missed television shows by logging onto that show or network’s website. The only thing I can’t get is my baseball, and I’m not going to die without my baseball.

I have been known to pack a couple DVD’s for a trip, or load them onto my laptop for viewing. I have a video ipod, but watching a movie on that thing is not a great experience for my eyes, so watching through the laptop is preferred. When traveling with the family, we usually pack the portable DVD players, which can then be easily hooked up to motel televisions.

Some hotels are getting into the act these days and providing easy ways for you to hook up your personal media to their in-room systems, including providing docks for media players and easy-t0-access video ports. Most of these are higher-end or business hotels, which means the local Motel 6 isn’t going to have these kinds of amenities. I would argue that maybe they should, to accommodate traveling families. Along with free WiFi or Internet access, I would argue these should be standard accommodations these days.

How do you consume media when you are traveling?

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “TV Habits When Traveling”

It has been an evolution for me when dealing with my media. Like you I would carry around DVDs.
Then I would rip the DVDs onto the hard drive. I got tired of watching all my ripped media on my
laptop. I then moved on to a Hard Drive media player. A nice little unit that could connect to the
TV in my hotel and also to my computer via USB.

Of course, I believe that this started to get under the skin of the hotels. Now most hotels have
LodgeNet and disable the AUX ports on the TV. So, I am back to watching my digital media
on my laptop. Of course, I always have the back-up of the Slingbox.

Hi there, for me when I am on travel my laptop is always at my bag, when I am at the bus for a long trip and get bored, I watched movies at my laptop, all movies there are downloaded from the internet, I have a movies folder at my laptop all of them are my favorite selections.